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I thought you might like to look at some photos of our Bali Do-Nothing vacation.
Padang-Padang Beach.
Waiting for our Bakso.
The view from our villa in Uluwatu.
The wife looks pleased with our room in Seminyak.
Petrol sold in bottles everywhere.
A Hibiscus from our villa's garden.
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Part 2 of our 15-second teaser video is out: http://mrbrwn.co/WVbCUc
In case you missed it last week, Miyagi and I are engaged in a bit of a Healthy Rivalry.
Healthy Rivalry lets you see how your health compares to your friends (your "rivals"), via the Healthy Lifestyle Index (HLI). The higher your score, the healthier your lifestyle! This is where Miyagi and I stand at the moment:
You can go to http://bit.ly/HLIsgBM to take the Healthy Lifestyle Index yourself.
Even though I am on vacation in Bali, I have been making sure I get my veggies and fruits, for instance. This was my breakfast this morning:
This little rivalry is really helping me make conscious choices about my food. Here are some of my other meals in Bali so far:
Sure we sometimes have cheat days (that bacon around my asparagus was probably not a good idea), but we can make a choice to eat healthy every day. Start by doing simple things like having less oily stuff, less, or for me, no sugar in our drinks, and less salt.
Do go and do the HLI to find out how healthy your lifestyle is: http://bit.ly/HLIsgBM
The Fitbit prizes we gave away for the first 30 were all snapped up but there are more to win this week so hurry down to do the HLI!
This week, my challenge is to exercise after being away so long. What do you suggest for Miyagi and me? I am planning to get on my bicycle again. How I missed it so!
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The Family Series by mrbrown (at Yahoo!): Turning Twelve
Excerpt:
A few days ago, my firstborn turned twelve.
Twelve years old: One cycle of the Chinese zodiac. The number of years it takes to make a single malt whiskey. The year for Primary School Leaving Examination.
Twelve years ago, my child was born. Sixteen years ago, my wife and I got married. And twenty-four years ago. my wife decided she would go steady with me.
Little did we know where our journey as a couple would take us. Little did we know of the challenges, and the joys, ahead. (cont'd)
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The wife and I are lepaking with some friends in Bali and having a blast.
So far, we have soaked in the private pool of our villa in Uluwatu and made a trip to Padang-Padang Beach.
Getting to that beach was quite a challenge because you have to climb down (and later up) a very narrow and steep flight of steps between two giant rocks.
I felt sorry for the surfers having to lug their heavy surfboards up and down the cliff, man.
One small observation from my time on the beach:
Ang Moh lady at a Bali beach: two tiny pieces of cloth.
Chinese lady at a Bali beach: giant straw hat, long pants and long-sleeved shirt.
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Youtube link: http://mrbrwn.co/11jm5ZV
This morning, when @Miyagi and I, @mrbrown, tweeted the hashtag #IfYouHappyAndYouKnowIt (yes I know it isn't grammatical but we happy what), I thought it would be a good idea to take some of the tweets we liked and make them into a song, on a whim.
This video was done after a few silly hours at the studio, completely unplanned. I have never written, recorded and filmed a song this fast before. I am tired, but happy.
Shoutouts of thanks to @ShunfuMart, @miyagi, @acupofgie, @PINKMOUSSECAKES, @ImranJohri, @zsdt1905, and @ChoCoLOve_Nic for their tweets!
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Miyagi and I recently took our Healthy Lifestyle Index (HLI) and look at my score! SEVEN leh!
Miyagi is only a 6! This made Miyagi buay song so he started a #healthyrivalry with me to see if we can beat each other's HLI score. Follow us on our blogs (mrbrown.com vs miyagi.sg) and twitter accounts (@mrbrown vs @miyagi) to see who wins!
You can watch our little 15-second teaser video here: http://mrbrwn.co/16GQlBP
The Healthy Lifestyle Index is a health monitoring tool to help you determine where you stand in terms of your key health behaviours and habits. You are scored from zero to 10 after you do the ten quick and easy questions. Very easy to do one!
Eh! Do you have a healthy rival too? Go start a rivalry, like ours, at www.healthylifestyleindex.sg/facebook
(Note: You can do the Healthy Lifestyle Index via a computer and mobile but it's better done from the desktop.)
Bonus: Go and do it and the first 30 readers from this blog to complete the HLI via http://bit.ly/HLImbmm will win a Fitbit Zip (worth S$105). Go! Go! Go!
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This is an Onion News Network parody news piece done two years ago.
Youtube link: http://mrbrwn.co/YOYJea
And this video below was done by CNN reporting on how a guilty verdict ruined the "promising" lives of two Steubenville rapists.
Youtube link: http://mrbrwn.co/15XgE5t
As one commenter sarcastically put it, "You can't send them to jail… they're good at football."
The world is turning upside down.
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The Family Series by mrbrown (at Yahoo!): The Best Toy Ever
Excerpt:
When I was a child, we couldn't afford many toys. My mother told me to suck it up and play with whatever toys she could get me from her friends. Not only did we have hand-me-down clothes, we also had hand-me-down toys.
We didn't really mind, my two younger brothers and I. But we did sometimes wish we could have a Six Million Dollar Man action figure with Bionic Eye and Working Bionic Grip (or even his balding boss, Oscar Goldman) or a few more Star Wars figures (I had about five). (cont'd)
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Youtube link: http://mrbrwn.co/Ww4tLi
It is tempting but cyclists, please don't squeeze! The final video in the Safe Cycling series.
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Today I was reminded of #SignsYouAreGettingOld:
1. @mrbrown: Took the Day Cream for the face, applied it to the hair.
2. @miyagi: Preparation-H toothpaste.
3. @ernchang: #SignsYouAreGettingOld Everyone else finishes at the urinal before you do, even if they started peeing AFTER you did.
4. @chengethan348SG: What is ORD?
5. @mrbrown: Talked about forgetting your bag over lunch. Actually forgot your bag immediately after lunch. Right, @miyagi ?
6. @mrbrown: You board the train at Serangoon and plan to go to Outram. Then on the train you hear "Next stop, Bartley Station".
7. @TommyWee: #SignsYouAreGettingOld Opened the fridge. Forgot why you opened the fridge.
8. @miyagi: @AmazingKumar just went into @dreamacademy admin to ask something, made a joke, and forgot what he wanted to ask.
9. @exoneration: People giving up their seats for you in the train/bus.
10. @mrbrown: Gold 90.5FM is now playing your kind of music.
11. @mrbrown: You receive your Eldershield letter.
12. @mrbrown: You find yourself saying things to your kids that your father/mother used to say to you.
13. @DaveEvans72: When you fill up that online form, you have to scroll all the way down for your year of birth.
14. @digitalmozart: Forgot what web site you want to visit after you launched your browser.
15. @mrbrown: The 5-year-olds you used to teach at Sunday School are now married. And have a kid.
16. @mrbrown: Your idea of K-Pop is Brown Eyes and Jo Sung Mo. And your J-Pop is Seiko Matsuda, Akina Nakamori & Checkers.
17. @mrbrown: You take a week to recover from one session of overnight computer gaming.
18. @dinnie: You use Yahoo mail as your mail email account. Heck, you HAVE Yahoo mail.
19. @FabesLau: When YOU'RE the one asking at CNY gatherings, "So when you getting married?"
20. @Raihaaaann: MSN is shutting down. (And you still have MSN and ICQ -mb)
21. @mrbrown: You have to read your iPhone by holding it at arm's length.
22. @mrbrown: You went to Jeff Chang's {张信哲} concert and got upset he sang so few of his old songs. Heck that you even went.
23. @mrbrown: You talk about "functions", "tea dances" and going discos like Fire, Sparks and Canto.
24. @mrbrown: The young ones puking their guts out by the roadside at Zouk were not even born yet when you did the same.
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Because I am part Peranakan, I was intrigued to read this piece from the BBC: Nonya kueh: Wolfing down Singapore's wobbliest cake.
After reading it, I decided that it was full of mistakes and Ivy Ong-Wood articulated it best:
"This is such a badly researched article. I expected more of the BBC, especially given that you have a base in Singapore and the "correspondent" claims to have been brought up here.
1) "Restaurants serving Singapore's fusion cuisine called Peranakan used to be hard to find." No, such restaurants have been around for as long as Peranakans have been around in S'pore.
2) Lapis is layer, not ladder. I don't know where she got her ladder analogy from.
3) "They were not allowed to bring women with them..." Not allowed? Voyage was expensive so only the breadwinners came, there was no question of permission.
4) "…this marriage of cultures has been called Peranakan, which means descendant" Peranakan means native-born, from the Malay root word "anak", not descendent.
5) "Peranakan culture, which used to be considered a disadvantaged background, was now chic." No, the Peranakans were considered the elites. Their children went to schools in England and they were closely allied to the British so they were local managers and big businessmen.
Please do your research properly. These are very basic facts. Your "correspondent" should at least have asked round the Singapore office. They could have put her right before such an embarrassing article came out."
Pro tip: Do NOT piss off a Peranakan about our culture, history and food.
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1. Go to Google Translate.
2. Type "minister mentor" (all lowercase or all uppercase).
3. Translate to Chinese…
(If you don't read Chinese, it's ok. Take the Chinese characters and translate them back to English.)
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I've had a Dell XPS 12 to play with for some time now. Let me share my thoughts on this hybrid Ultrabook.
As a user of a Macbook Air 13-inch, I am intimately familiar with the Ultrabook form factor, since most PC manufacturers realized there was a market for these beasts when the Air sold like crazy.
The Dell XPS 12 running Windows 8 is not exactly the thinnest and lightest Ultrabook out there (it is 1.54kg to the MBA's 1.35kg) but it does include a flippable touchscreen that makes it into a tablet. In real world terms, an XPS 12 is lighter if you carry a MacBook Air and an iPad together.
Here are the specs of my stock model, priced at S$1,899
Processor: 3rd Generation Intel® Core™ i5-3317U Processor (3M Cache, up to 2.6 GHz, TPM)
OS: Windows 8 Pro, English (64bit)
Display: 12.5 inch LED Backlit Touch Display with True Life and FHD resolution (1920 x 1080)
Memory: 4GB Dual-channel DDR3 (soldered on-board)
Storage: 128GB Solid State Drive
Graphics Card: Intel® HD Graphics 4000
Weight: 1.54kg
The screen is where the Dell XPS 12 shines. Even though it is slightly smaller at 12.5 inches to the MBA's 13.3-inch screen, it is full HD at 1920 x 1080 compared to the 1440 x 900 on the MBA. That's quite a lot more pixels. And it is Gorilla glass.
At first glance, the frame of the XPS 12 and it's flippin' screen (sounds so wrong) looks flimsy but after using it a bit, the construction feels robust.
I spend a lot of time with input devices, writing and editing, and the keyboard feel is nice but I wasn't fond of the trackpad. The touchscreen felt responsive though, which is great if you are a heavy tablet-form-factor user, not so great if you are a laptop-form-factor user.
I enjoyed using it in the tablet format. But sometimes the Windows 8 OS throws me off. At 12.5 inches, the screen is great for watching movies in full glorious HD and surfing but again, recently I've started migrating from my full-sized 10-inch iPad to my iPad mini more. So it depends on how you use tablets, really. At this size and weight, the XPS 12 is not a tablet you can hold with one hand in the MRT train. But it is cool to watch movies off it on a plane.
Performance and battery life is about what you'd expect out of an Ultrabook/Macbook with these specs. As a tablet, it blows the ATOM and ARM-based tablets out of the water since it is running a 3rd-gen Intel i5 processor inside.
The XPS 12 does not have a Ethernet port but you can add one via USB if you wish. The wifi is Dual-band 2x2 which is serviceable, though I wish it were the faster 3x3 kind as we need more and more bandwidth. I'd buy a USB Ethernet adapter for those days when you are able to use a wired network connection.
I'd say the XPS 12 is a good buy if you are looking for a single replacement for your laptop and tablet needs. It isn't the thinnest, lightest and fastest ultra-thin laptop or tablet out there, but as a hybrid, it does pretty well. For what Microsoft is asking for a Surface Pro and keyboard (sold separately), you may be better served by the XPS 12, especially if you don't need the Surface's strength with pen-based input.
Go ahead, take the Dell XPS 12 out for a spin, or more accurately, for a flip.
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Youtube link: http://mrbrwn.co/WgFoT4
When should cyclists "take the lane"?
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When I read about the club/lounge for the rich, at Marina Bay Sands, called Pangaea, I keep seeing Pangseh and Pangsai.
"Eh Lim ah! Tonight want to go Marina Bay Sands the Pangsai Club or not?"
"Mai lah! Last time you Pangseh Club me!"
Poor folk like me go Pangaea will probably Pengsan at the prices. Maybe I can sneak in and use their toilets to Pangjio.
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What is this means: Core Singaporean?
You are either Singaporean or you're not. Where got Core or not Core one? You are made from the rocks here in Singapore meh?
Ron Tan suggested:
Married Singaporean without kids = Duo Core.
Married with 2 kids = Core 2 Duo.
Married with 4 kids = Quad Core.
Or maybe it is Singaporeans who have awesome abs.
Or maybe it is Singaporeans whose lives are Kang Core and Core Lian.
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Photo by Doug Wheller
Who wants to be a millionaire? Go to mrbrownshow.com.
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Youtube link: http://mrbrwn.co/XUpBsL
Cityhousefly did this video of last week's podcast, in double quick time, and already has more than 128,000 views! Thanks dude!
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